by Richard Subber | May 28, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature
self-serving lies, and dreams…
Book review:
The Self-Made Man in America:
The Myth of Rags to Riches
by Irvin G. Wyllie (1920-1974)
New York, The Free Press, 1954
210 pages
The Self-Made Man in America is a historian’s delight.
Wyllie offers the multiple meanings of “the self-made man” throughout American history, connecting historical elements of the American dream and the self-serving promotion of the concept by titans of industry and their bankers.
There is a panoply of quotations from key decision-makers throughout the decades that aid the reader in understanding how Americans at all ranks in the socioeconomic spectrum advocated, criticized, and embodied the siren song of “the self-made man.”
To be sure, Wyllie plainly states his verdict: “Throughout all our history the self-made man was the exception not the rule…success has been for the few, not the many….Men who occupy the lowest places in our society have known the facts for a long time…but…men on the bottom need dreams.” (p. 174)
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review:
Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene
he’s sincere, but off the mark…
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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | May 9, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, Politics
we ask too much…
Book review:
What It Is Like to Go to War
by Karl Marlantes
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011
256 pages
There are two kinds of readers who can presume to learn something from Marlantes’ second book, What It Is Like to Go to War: those who have combat experience, and those who don’t.
I guess you will feel just about every emotion while you’re reading it. I did.
Of course, we ask too much of our men and women who go to war.
Of course, sadly, we don’t know how to say “thank you” and we find it hard to figure out how to say “you don’t have to tell us everything you did, unless you want to.”
Of course, we don’t say often enough “you’re still a good person.”
Marlantes’ first book was Matterhorn, a robustly intuitive assessment of the mind and experience of a warfighter.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
A poet is a “maker”
…and the poem doesn’t have to rhyme…
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many waters: more poems with 53 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Feb 20, 2023 | Human Nature, Tidbits
wanderer…
“I am the highway
and a peregrine
and all the sails that ever went to sea.”
Prodigious words by Robert Kincaid, in The Bridges of Madison County (by Robert Waller, 1995, p. 153)
Francesca Johnson confessed that she was “overwhelmed by his sheer emotional and physical power,” and those words were his response.
A peregrine is a falcon, of course, and it also means foreigner, alien, rover, wanderer, migrant, stranger…
…but love is not a stranger in The Bridges of Madison County.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Scarlet Letter
the beating hearts…by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Jan 6, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
television is entertainment at its worst
Book review:
Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman (1931-2003)
New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books/Viking, 1985
184 pages
This is a rare treasure—a can’t-put-it-down kind of book.
I wish I’d read it 40 years ago.
Amusing Ourselves to Death is a 184-page drumbeat of insight and reality about the devastating impact of television on our culture and our prospects of living the good life.
Postman, a media theorist and cultural critic, says television “is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.” (p. 141)
He wrote the book before the internet got really started, and before the enhanced horrors of social media like Facebook and Twitter and TikTok.
He continued to write about the failures of our educational enterprises and the negative impacts of technology on our culture.
Don’t let Amusing Ourselves to Death be the only Postman book you read in the near future.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Nov 12, 2022 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
you don’t have many close friends…
Book review:
Friends: Understanding the Power
of our Most Important Relationships
by Robin Dunbar
London: Little, Brown, 2021
424 pages
This is a great book.
Robin Dunbar fans will recognize his deeply informed, very readable prose, and his comfortable and spectacular familiarity with quite a number of well-researched points of view.
Friends will confirm what you already know, on some level: friends and close family members are essential in your personal and social life, and you don’t have very many of them.
Typically, a person has five close friends/family members with whom she can share anything and everything, as often as possible. These five intimates are part of the circle of about 15 “best friends” who are nurtured and enjoyed in the greater part of the time you spend socializing, that is, being with and being in contact with other people.
Impersonal contact via social media is not a substitute for actually spending time with your friends. (By the way, nobody has 897 “friends” on Faceboook or SnapChat—if you think you do, try calling them and getting them to meet you for coffee or anything else to drink.)
Staying in touch with friends is especially important for old-timers. You can literally live longer if you maintain some active friendships.
The basic thing about friendship is trust: you know the other person well enough to understand how he thinks, and you trust him to act accordingly, and you know you can ask him for help if you need it.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review:
Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene
sincere, but off the mark…
–
Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 74 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Apr 22, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature
toil and trouble….and craziness
Book review:
The Witches: Salem, 1692
by Stacy Schiff (b1961)
Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2015
498 pages
It may be that Stacy Schiff has neglected to include some fact or sentiment about the Salem witch trials, but I can’t imagine what it might be. The Witches is an expansive compendium of the whos and whats and whys and wherefores of this compelling—yet essentially impenetrable—story about a community gone crazy.
Maybe you had to be there to understand it.
It’s too easy to suggest that the McCarthy Communism hunting in 1954 is a modern analogy, but it won’t work. The whole dreadful McCarthy thing was a political football, approaching a sideshow even though it attracted the nominal attention of the nation and destroyed many lives.
The Salem witch trials (and the witch hunting that went on in neighboring towns) consumed the waking hours of all the townsfolk, who were deeply convinced that witches exist and that they were in league with satanic forces.
For my taste, Schiff tells too much of the story. I would have been content with a less detailed account. There is repetition that is dispensable.
For my taste, she struck a good balance between telling the story as it happened, and inviting the reader to suspect that the teenage girls were fooling all along, and that too many accusers had a personal reason to “get” the accused, and that too many religious and civic leaders who struggled unsuccessfully with their religious faith and the opposing impulses of their arguably decent selves had quickly figured out that the witch craze was a very nasty game.
You don’t need to read the whole book to figure out that there was some very destructive bogus stuff going on in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692.
You don’t need to read the whole book to be convinced that some folks aren’t continuously motivated by a decent streak of good will and a desire to support communal well-being.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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